When is it time to give up on a 3Gs

So a couple weeks back I bought an iphone 3Gs 16gig at a Customs and Police seizure auction. I put a blind bid in and won so I was both happy and nervous. Happy because I won and nervous because I didn't get to see it before the buy. When I got it home I was glad to see the screen come to life with the 'Plug into iTunes' screen so there was relief in knowing that it had some life. Now I have been out of the jailbreak and unlock scene for about a year but I imagined that I would be able to figure it out if it needed to be unlocked. See, Im here in New Zealand where all phones are unlocked, but at a police auction you never know what you are going to get.

So through quite a few hours of trial and error I have come to the conclusion that this phone must have been coked at one point. It is currently stuck in Recovery mode but through tny umbrella i managed to get a glimpse of some greenpois0n code. I have tried most of the various methods for forcing the 3GS out of Recovery mode. I have tried using iRecovery, Limera1n, Blackra1n, Redsnow, Pwnage Tools of various versions and even let over to a PC to try using iREB, Sn0wbreeze and reformatting from a iTunes in the PC. Greenp0ison is the only one that actually gets a reaction but it is fruitless.

I have come to the conclusion that this iPhone 3GS must have been unlocked using the Ipad Baseband and is currently stuck in Recovery mode with nothing but rejections from iTunes when i try and use custom firmware (or any firmware for that matter). I even tried to stop itunes from calling home and just calling locally but I didn't do that right so far and that is what I will try and do correctly next. The reality is im probably 9 hours deep total and I personally don't know when to quit. So I need some advice. Do I quite? Am I missing something? Thoughts? I am hoping that someone will say ' hey stupid you are missing this, this and this' but Im not that optimistic. Suggestions? Give Up?

Also:

iBoot-931.71.16 (4.2 GM and 4.2.1 Builds 8C148, 8C148a, and 8C154)

Also, got a bit more info out of it.

USB High-Speed Bus:

Host Controller Location: Built-in USB
Host Controller Driver: AppleUSBEHCI
PCI Device ID: 0x283a
PCI Revision ID: 0x0004
PCI Vendor ID: 0x8086
Bus Number: 0xfa

Apple Mobile Device (Recovery Mode):

Product ID: 0x1281
Vendor ID: 0x05ac (Apple Inc.)
Version: 0.00
Serial Number: CPID:8920 CPRV:15 CPFM:03 SCEP:03 BDID:00 ECID:00000122D6190DF6 IBFL:01 SRNM:[320200B03NQ] IMEI:[012155005918915]
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: Apple Inc.
Location ID: 0xfa200000
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 500


and:

Entering recovery mode, starting command prompt
no reasonable default block write routine
stack[20] = 0x840134e9, value[47] = 0xb40f
Found printf at 0x84013519
Found malloc at 0x8400a59d
Found free at 0x84009b45
Found gCmdListBegin at 0x84019000
Found gCmdListEnd at 0x8401902c
Found jump_to at 0x8400de8d
Unable to find fsboot
Unable to find load_ramdisk
Found uart_read at 0x84007fc5
Found uart_write at 0x84007ee5
Found task_yield at 0x8400e715
Fund gTaskRunning at 0x84019c00
Found gTaskList at 0x84019c98
Found task_create at 0x8400e639
Found task_start at 0x8400e575
Found aes_crypto_cmd at 0x8400f96d
Unable to find gBdevList
Found gImageList at 0x84021800
Found gNvramList at 0x84019cc0
Unable to find fs_mount
Unable to find fs_unmount
Unable to find fs_load_file
Found gBootArgs at 0x84015dfc
Found kernel_load at 0x8400b0e1
Greenpois0n initialized

Gah... Thanks

Have you not managed to get it into DFU mode? Does it charge at all?

Originally Posted by Olethros

Have you not managed to get it into DFU mode? Does it charge at all?

I Olethros,

I have managed to get it into DFU, Tried Fix REcovery in Tiny Umbrella, Tried Custom IPSW in iTunes in DFU and Recovery Modes as well. Check out this screen shot of tiny umbrella though. It recognizes the device but gives no info.

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m...0at91545AM.png


Also, does not ever show that it is charging.

Originally Posted by ffrost3

I Olethros,

I have managed to get it into DFU, Tried Fix REcovery in Tiny Umbrella, Tried Custom IPSW in iTunes in DFU and Recovery Modes as well. Check out this screen shot of tiny umbrella though. It recognizes the device but gives no info.

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m...0at91545AM.png.

Can you post a screenshot of what SystemProfiler shows about the device when it is in DFU mode?

Originally Posted by ffrost3

Also, does not ever show that it is charging

This can point to a hardware problem

However it is also true that the phone doesn't charge when in some bootloop/partly booted states. If that is the case, when the phone fully boots it will charge again normally.

SO we need to work out exactly what state it is in right now (doesn't look like DFU from the screenshot you posted)

I have to say this was quite a major deal and as I stated in the begining I was sure the iphone was too far gone. However, I found another person with the same issue and we got it sorted out.

The culprit for my problems was TinyUmbrella, I'm not sure if it's a feature (or setting toggle) that they added (or made default) in the latest version or not but it's very simple. Open up TinyUmbrella and go to the Advanced tab, when there uncheck the following option:

"Set hosts to Cydia on exit"

While TinyUmbrella is open it sets all hosts to ping the Cydia servers rather than the Apple ones (at least in my experience) which is why you shouldn't do a restore/update while TinyUmbrella is open. If the above setting is enabled then it keeps those settings even if TinyUmbrella is closed.

So, in a nutshell here are the steps I did to fix my issue.

1. Fired up TinyUmbrella and changed the above mentioned setting
2. Closed TinyUmbrella
3. Fired up iTunes and ran a normal restore (of course since it was an iPad BaseBand it failed and put me into recovery mode, I did this to get out of the DFU/Greenpois0n loop I was stuck in)
4. Fired up Pwnagetool 4.3.3 and created a fresh custom 4.3.3 IPSW (I got the IPSW file from iTunes)((I also got rid of the previous ones I had made as they were corrupted)).
5. Using Pwnagetool, put the device into pwned DFU mode.
6. Went back into iTunes and custom restored to the custom 4.3.3 IPSW Pwnagetool created.
7. I laughed hysterically as the restore completed successfully!

This took my phone from the depths of despair:

To Success.

Thanks for trying to help!

Glad you worked it out in the end, I guess we mis-understood your original description-

The "uncheck set hosts to Cydia on exit" will only help in one of the following situations:

• You have an iPhone 4 (and the restore/upgrade/downgrade tries to change or reload your baseband)
• Restoring from pwned DFU mode and you don't have a SHSH saved with Cydia for the iOS version you are trying to restore
• Cydia's TSS proxy service is malfunctioning and returns an incomplete or invalid SHSH for the iOS version you are trying to restore (very unlikely)
• Cydia's TSS server wasn't yet handling correctly requests for SHSH blobs for the latest iOS version (this was definitely a problem with 4.3.3 up to a day or two ago)

The last option was most likely the explanation for why "uncheck set hosts to Cydia on exit" fixed your problem. I believe that Cydia's SHSH proxy can now handle requests for 4.3.3

There was no indication in your original post that the baseband had been updated to the iPad baseband.